Half Life 2 and Steam

[imported_Pipes]

I used to be presented an option to run Half Life 2 off line. Now that I started the game I can't figure out how to do this short of unplugging my ethernet cable (edit: haven't tried that yet) . My concern is that steam is running as a process at 40,000 K. This is a huge waste of resources unless one needs steam running in the processes to play Half Life 2. Any experts out there. Thanks.

 

[sswingle]

Steam is required. May as well get over it. To run offline, you need to log into steam succesfully once. Then the next time you go into steam and there is no internet, it will prompt for offline mode. But going to offline mode won't help with what you want to do. Steam will still load and take up the same resources whether it is online or offline.

Oh, and my steam is only taking about 20 mb...

 

[imported_haris]

Steam is only using about 10K on my machine. The only way I can get Steam to run any game off line has been to unplug my network connection. Once I start steam without a connection it switches to off-line mode.

I think steam is required to be running, because I tried to launch hl2 with a shortcut and it wouldn't start.

 

[gururu]

it's a real PITA for dial up connections I'll tell ya. :|

 

[imported_Pipes]

Thanks for the replies. I had no problems with steam for set up purposes, but having it around anytime HL2 is running sucks. WTF. Maybe if my processes reported 2,500 K, instead of 40,000 K I wouldn't be as pissed. Annoying. Big brother in the game, and big brother Valve/Steam on your computer. All this being said it's a cool game.